We see it all the time – companies who deployed a standards-based voice application platform only to find out that they’re still locked in. How does that happen? After all, isn’t portability a key tenet of open standards?

Of course it is, but the fact is that your provider doesn’t want you going anywhere. To accomplish this, many vendors bundle proprietary tools that make it difficult to switch solutions should your requirements change down the road. Even standards-touting VoiceXML providers often use proprietary call control and VoiceXML tags to cleverly move lock-in from the platform level to the application level.

At Voxeo, we keep our customers by providing them with a better product and better support - never by locking them in. Voxeo offers the only VoiceXML browser to pass 100% of the VoiceXML Forum’s compliance test suite, including all optional tests, and the world’s most deployed CCXML browser. We support all of the secondary W3C voice standards and more SIP capabilities than any other vendor. Equally important, Voxeo strictly adheres to the principles behind open standards. The result is greater choice, unmatched flexibility, lower costs and true portability.

Since Voxeo’s customers own their intellectual property, they can switch providers, engage different development resources, or change their deployment model if requirements change.

With Voxeo you are free to:

• Move from hosting to a premise or hybrid deployment (or the other way around)
• Use your application development partner or VoiceXML development tool of choice
• Leverage the Voxeo VoiceObjects service creation environment to “design once and deploy anywhere.” VoiceObjects applications seamlessly work across all leading VoiceXML platforms and across multiple channels, including voice, IM, SMS and the mobile web. These phone channels can share the underlying dialog flow definition, business logic and back-end access, drastically simplifying development, maintenance, and reporting.
• Use your speech vendor of choice; Voxeo offers free built-in speech recognition and synthesis, as well as support for any MRCP-compliant engine
• Choose from a variety of TDM and VoIP carriers
• Run your application on any standards-compliant platform, including those of our competitors

If you are interested in learning more about Voxeo and our standards-based platform, contact us today.

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Due to overwhelming interest and demand, we have decided to extend the deadline for this year's I Speak Dragon contest to July 15th.  That means more time for some great stories to be shared!

If you haven't yet, please drop by ispeakdragon.nuance.com and tell us your own Dragon story! 

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I got this in my email today:

Dear Marshall Harrison,
Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2009 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Communications Server technical communities during the past year.

This is my 4th year and I am honored to be named MVP again.

Today was also my first day of being laid off. Or to put it another way – today is my first day as an independent OCS/Speech Server consultant.

I’m excited about the opportunities that being an independent consultant provides me. It gives me the freedom to work on things that I find interesting and it gives me the opportunity to pursue speaking and training assignments. I like the fact that I will get more interaction with other companies looking to take advantage of OCS and Speech Server. I truly like the role of evangelist for these technologies and I’m looking forward to experimenting more with Speech Server and UCMA 2.0. I’m also glad that this will give me more time to spend promoting/growing GotSpeech.Net and GotUC.Net. I have been so busy with other things that I haven’t been as active on my forums as I would like but that will be changing.

But this new venture also means that I have to round up my own business so if you know of anyone that needs training, mentoring, coding or other consulting work then just send them my way.

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Hey, Speech Heads. If you caught yesterday’s post, an omitted sidebar from my article, you likely saw a response from Walt Testchner. He felt that I had taken what he said out of context. I wrote that he said that felt that technologists were the best gauges of knowing whether their art is infringing or something [...]

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Speech Heads, you’ll remember from a couple weeks ago when I posted about Bilski v. Doll that I had mentioned a forthcoming patent feature cover article. Well, I am happy to report that the wait is practically over. The issue is out the door and will be stuffed in your mailboxes in a matter of [...]

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A couple of weeks ago we had started to take a look at the structure of Infostore,  the VoiceObjects data repository for real-time caller behavior analysis. (Incidentally - yes, the second installment of this series is in the pipeline.)  Infostore is the basis for statistical data analysis using Business Intelligence (BI) tools such as MicroStrategy (for [...]

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Only one month to go before the 75th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF 75) begins on Monday, July 27, in Stockholm, Sweden. The latest draft of the meeting agenda is available and authors are busy updating their Internet-Drafts in advance of the looming publication cut-off dates.

Unfortunately, with everything else going on in my life (new job role here at Voxeo, new child, etc.), I am not planning to travel there to be in the face-to-face meetings. Once again, I’ll be participating remotely via streaming audio and Jabber chat rooms… although the 6 hours time difference from US Eastern will definitely prove to be a bit challenging.

I expect I won’t be alone in being remote, especially given current economic times and travel budgets within the industry in general. Hopefully the IETF will make available the “HTML-ized” agenda like the one available for IETF 74 - http://tools.ietf.org/agenda/74/ - that so nicely brought together all the links to relevant Internet drafts, Jabber rooms, etc. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, if you are going to Stockholm, I wish you all the best for your travel. I’ve never been to Stockholm but the pictures on the http://www.ietf75.se/ site and links from there do make it look intriguing to visit.

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Technorati Tags: IETF, standards, stockholm

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In a very cool demonstration of what you can do with the IMified platform, you can now use either IM or Twitter to find out the status of bills in the New York state senate.

Shortly after we announced the acquisition of IMified, independent developer Mark Headd let us know he was excited to give it a try for some of the “open government” projects he works on and documents on his VOX POPULI blog. On June 18th, he put up a great example: Building an IM Bot for the NY Senate OpenLeg API where you can simply send a Jabber/GoogleTalk IM message to:

opensenate@bot.im

with a New York Senate bill number in it and get back the status of that bill.

When we added Twitter support to IMified last week, Mark quickly added a Twitter ID to his service so that now you can simply send a Twitter “@” message to “@opensenate” with the same kind of request. You can see some of the interaction so far on the twitter.com/opensenate page.

Mark has nicely made available in his blog post the sample PHP code for his IMified bot. Mark has also been exchanging comments with Nathan Freitas from the New York Senate CIO team. It’s very cool to see that Mark was the very first external user of the NY Senate API. (Congrats, Mark!)

It’s all great work and we’re pleased to see what Mark has done with the platform.

Two other comments:

1. I was not personally aware of this NY Senate openness initiative, but from this article, “5 Open tenets of the new NYSenate.gov“, it sounds like some excellent work. (Note to NH state gov’t: can I get access like this, too, please?)

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Technorati Tags: ny, nysenate, open, open government, government, voxeo, imified

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If you subscribe to industry newsletters and frequent industry websites, you may have noticed an increased number of webinars and whitepapers on Outbound Interactive Voice Response (IVR). The recent flurry of activity isn’t surprising given analyst forecasts. For example, Datamonitor predicts the market for hosted Outbound IVR services in North America alone will more than double from an estimated $213 million in 2008 to $524 million by 2013.

Outbound IVR offers companies the ability to provide proactive customer service, deliver important notifications, expedite collections and more. But to truly put the advantages of this technology to work for you, it is important to understand the intricacies of successful outbound calling, how it differs from your Inbound IVR solutions, and the importance of delivering a cohesive customer experience.

At Voxeo, Outbound IVR is old hat. A large portion of our hosting business can be attributed to customers with high-volume outbound traffic. In fact, last month a Voxeo hosted customer made 1.3 million outbound phone calls in 1.5 hours. In our latest whitepaper, “The Ins and Outs of Outbound IVR,” we set out to share some of the knowledge we’ve gathered over the last ten years, including a few gotchas to be aware of, as well as success factors that will make your campaigns better and your customers happier.

Read Voxeo’s new Outbound IVR whitepaper now. You can also learn more about our Outbound IVR capabilities, including how to get started for free at www.voxeo.com/outboundivr

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What is the best Twitter plugin for WordPress MU for simply publishing tweets when new blog posts are published? Or for WordPress in general?

It’s a question I’ve been mulling over a lot recently as I’ve been looking at:

1. Reducing the number of tweaks I have to make to WordPress plugins on this site; and

Back in December 2007, when I first linked this blog site to our Twitter stream, I wound up using Alex King’s great Twitter Tools plugin (see also here). The challenge, though, is this:

I had to hack the plugin code to make it work for us.

THE PROBLEM

Specifically, I went into the code to remove the “New blog post:” that gets added as a prefix to any new message going out to Twitter. This is difficult to do by design, as Alex states in his plugin FAQ:

Is there any way to change the ‘New Blog Post:’ prefix when my new posts get tweeted?

Yes there is, but you have to change the code in the plugin file.

The reason this is done this way, and not as an easily changeable option from the admin screen, is so that the plugin correctly identifies the tweets that originated from previous blog posts when creating the digest posts, displaying the latest tweet, displaying sidebar tweets, and creating blog posts from tweets (you don’t want tweets that are blog post notifications being treated like tweets that originated on Twitter).

Can I remove the ‘New Blog Post:’ prefix entirely?

No, this is not a good idea. Twitter Tools needs to be able to look at the beginning of the tweet and identify if it’s a notification from your blog or not. Otherwise, Twitter Tools and Twitter could keep passing the blog posts and resulting tweets back and forth resulting in the ’spinning fireball of death’ mentioned above.

I have, of course, removed the prefix entirely. And now the problem is that whenever I need to upgrade the plugin, I have to remember to make this modification. Not good.

The issue is that there is a basic fundamental disconnect between the purpose of the Twitter Tools plugin and what I want to do.

The Twitter Tools plugin allows you not only to publish Twitter messages when you have a new blog post, but also perhaps more importantly to publish a blog post aggregating all your Twitter messages. So at some interval you have a new blog post that contains all your recent tweets. While I can see this being tremendously useful in some cases, and is honestly something I’ve been thinking about for my own personal blog, the truth is that for the Voxeo blog portal…

I don’t care!

All I really want out of the Twitter plugin is to publish a tweet whenever we publish a new blog post. I want the one-way push. And that is not where the power lies in the Twitter Tools plugin.

The challenge now in mid-2009 is that it seems like every developer, their brothers, sisters, parents, aunts and uncles have made a Twitter plugin for WordPress - there’s a zillion of them!

A SOLUTION?

So far, in the limited time I’ve had to research this, the plugin that has caught my eye is “Twitter Publisher” by Timan Rebel. It does precisely what it is says… very simply publishes a tweet any time you post a blog post. It does have the ability to add a tweet prefix, but that is blank by default. It also nicely has the ability to use either the bit.ly or awe.sm URL shortening service, which lets me tie the shortened URLs into my bit.ly account for tracking purposes.

I’ve installed this over on the VoiceObjects Developer Portal, which is currently a standalone WordPress (not WPMU) site, and so tweets now appear in our main Twitter stream when blog posts are published there. So far it seems to be working fine, although a couple of times I have been puzzled by how it has abbreviated the blog post title. For instance, here, pointing to this blog post, the post title is:

Adapt-to-me, as I don’t want to adapt to you

yet it was shortened to:

Adapt-to-me, as I don’t want to adap…

which seems strange as it didn’t seem to need to be shortened like that.

Outside of that, it’s been working well so far. I’m intrigued to try out the capability to also send a message to an author’s Twitter account based on including an author’s Twitter name in his/her profile.

MOVING AHEAD

Part of my reason for writing this post is to find out what plugins others have found useful for one-way publishing to Twitter. I have two steps I need to take:

1. Add a Twitter plugin to blog.imified.com so that posts there automatically appear in our main Twitter stream (Added challenge there: ideally we would like tweets to appear in both @voxeo and @imified)

The one challenge with Twitter Publisher is that it’s not 100% clear that it will work with WordPress MU, although I’ve generally found most WP plugins to work well with WPMU.

So I throw the question out there… what Twitter plugins for WordPress MU (or WordPress) have you found work the best for updating your Twitter stream whenever you publish a new blog post?

(Thanks in advance)

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Technorati Tags: wordpress, wpmu, wordpressmu, twitter, plugins

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I’ve seen Tweets all morning coming out of the Personal Democracy Forum Conference about New York City’s 311 service. Looks like NYC 311, in addition to being on the web, is now also on Skype (user name is nyc311) and on Twitter.

I’m following @311NYC on Twitter now, and I’ve also added it to my Skype contacts (not sure yet if they support voice/video calls, or chat).

Now, if they’d open up their 311 service via an API (like Washington DC is doing), then they’d be cooking with gas. Good stuff! Hope to see more of this.

a

NYC 311 Gets Skyped, Twittified!

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Imagine a computer that not only understands what you say but also says it the way you can understand. Imagine a computer that you can talk to the way you talk to humans and that responds the way humans respond. Imagine a computer that can read your thoughts and communicate with you as seamlessly as [...]

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Are you the kind of person who took apart gadgets when you were young, just to see what they looked like on the inside? Are you unafraid of getting your hands a little dirty to better understand how the cogs move the shafts? Then this article is for you! Voxeo VoiceObjects Developer Edition provides you with [...]

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Speech Heads, there has been no shortage of rumors flying around about Vicorp as of late. In April, the London Gazette briefly reported that Vicorp U.K. Limited was being voluntarily “wound down,” or liquidated. The announcement followed a number of layoffs, wherein many staff members were immediately terminated at the end of March.  The company also [...]

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Today we are very pleased to announce that our IMified platform now lets you build applications that interact directly with Twitter. In fact, if you’ve already built an application (or “IM bot”) that interacts with the leading IM networks, adding Twitter support is this easy:

1. Register a Twitter name with Twitter
2. Add the Twitter name to your bot configuration (and go through the Twitter OAuth process)
3. Start receiving and generating messages to and from Twitter

That’s it.

Everytime someone sends a “@” message or a direct message (DM) to your Twitter account, the contents of that tweet will be sent to your application. Your app can reply back with more information, or really do anything else with that data.

Why might you want to do this? As we said in the news release:

As the volume of a company’s Twitter messages grows, an application on the IMified platform can scan incoming tweets and reply back as appropriate based on information in the message, speeding up the response time and allowing company staff to focus on more detailed inquiries. As another example, companies using Twitter as a customer service channel can create an application that will respond to Twitter inquiries late at night when customer service staff are not available. Similarly an application could scan messages and alert staff via IM or other channels when certain Twitter users contact the company or certain keywords appear in tweets.

“Think of all the typical information you gather at the beginning of a customer service interaction like the user’s name, account details, or a description of the problem they are having,” York continued. “Unlike phone-based IVR where a user has to work through menus, Twitter and other short-message communication services enable automated agents to supplement human support without putting a menu barrier in front of people. Automated agents can watch both public and private/direct Twitter messages and either respond with the appropriate information or make sure the appropriate person responds to the message.”

The IMified platform also supports outbound notification via Twitter and can be linked to other business processes and systems. A library, for example, can receive a query from a user about a certain book. When the book becomes available, the application can send the user a Twitter direct message with this information. In a similar fashion, a company can create a loyalty program that alerts users when specific sales or events occur. In both cases, the application can send automated messages from the same Twitter account used by company staff so that replies can be seen and handled by staff.

We’ve seen an increasing interest by companies in adding Twitter as yet another customer service / customer interaction channel. We want to help them expand and scale their Twitter usage.

For us it is all part of our broader “Unified Self-Service” vision where you can write an application once and have that application interact with customers in whatever medium they choose to contact you. I’ve drawn it this way:

That’s the vision we’ve been building for some time now… and we’re delighted to announce the addition of one part of the social messaging part of that picture today. Now… we’re excited to see what you all will do with it!

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Technorati Tags: voxeo, imified, twitter, microblogging, customerservice, enterprise, e2conf

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Sometimes it’s the little announcements that catch your eye. Most of the time I just read the vendor announcements on some customer win and move on, but this one caught my eye for two reasons; the humorous bent of the announcement and more fodder for a trend I’ve been seeing. The trend is that many vendors, NEC, Voxify, and Nortel, among others, have been catering to the hospitality industry. For example, Nortel just announced their participation in providing IP and unified communications in the opening of the M Resort Spa and Casino in Las Vegas in April. Part of the hospitality push on the part of vendors is in providing guest services through touch screens on telephones, making it easier to get to services and request customer service, for example. Today NEC announced their part in supplying the communications infrastructure for theWit, a Doubletree boutique hotel that opened in May in Chicago. The phone services were described as follows, including the wake up call feature, which just cracked me up: “Guest rooms at theWit feature touch-screen access to a variety of services, such as valet notification, setting restaurant reservations, ordering wake-up calls, requesting towels from housekeeping, and looking up airline flight or weather information, all using easy-to-navigate applications from DOCOMO interTouch on NEC’s UNIVERGE® DT750 IP phones. Guests with a sense of humor can request wake-up calls with a message recorded by a celebrity impressionist from the Second City Chicago. Celebrity voices include President Barack Obama, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, Al Capone and Harry Caray. NEC’s UNIVERGE SV8500 enterprise-class communications server provides voice over IP (VoIP) service to both guests and hotel staff.” I occasionally opt for a boutique hotel, in part because of access to guest services. I might just try this one the next time I’m in Chicago so that I can have Al Capone wake me up in the morning.

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What better way to start a blog about using speech recognition with Nuance's Dragon NaturallySpeaking than to use it to blog about how easy it was to install, or not easy to install, and then use, as the case may be. Dragon NaturallySpeaking, if you aren’t familiar with it, is a speech-driven dictation package, which allows a user to dictate letters, documents, emails, or do things on the web, and have it typed for you. That is pretty cool. I installed Dragon NaturallySpeaking Version 10 Professional Edition today and it took about 20 minutes to install, with a few minutes to stop and close the files that it needed to access such as Word or Outlook. What I didn't count on was the fact that when I got the package I didn't install it right away, and so immediately I had to install Service pack 1, which took about 20 minutes of time. I think in all it took about 45 minutes to install everything with a few fits and starts, but training on the other hand was a breeze. Afterwards the system had to adapt my user files and asked me questions about whether or not I wanted to have the option to have it adapt to my writing style such as whether I'm to be using this for Word or for e-mails. So now I'm sitting here dictating this at after about an hour and a half, with some interruptions, which I think is pretty good. Now I have to go back to the training to figure out how to correct this in my blog. For my first try, so far the hardest thing is figuring out what you can say without having too many pauses, which some times stops your thought process. It's also not naturally intuitive to put in things like commas and other punctuation when you're talking which makes it harder to think about what you could be saying. But even as a novice user what I really liked about the application, is the speed at which I can dictate and have it actually type for me. I'm not sure yet, whether or not I should look at the screen as it's doing it or just talk. This will take some getting used to. And so far, it really does seem to be pretty accurate except in the case of some colloquialisms, such as it typing ‘bits and stars’ instead of what I said, which was ‘fits and starts’. When I tried it again just now, and said it more slowly, it did get it right the second time. Maybe it is my enunciation. Now that was a laugh, because no matter how many times I said ‘enunciation’, it typed it as Nancy Asian. I wonder who this Nancy Asian person is. What to Expect With just a short training – the system learns and adapts to your voice over time, so maybe this Nancy Asian person will go away – I thought it was pretty good. I expect that I would get over having to think more about what I’m saying and add in the punctuation as I go along. I also noticed something that we all hear, but tend to forget, and that is we speak differently than we type. So, for example, I used the word ‘system’ when talking about Dragon, but when I saw that in print, I changed it to ‘application’, and so forth. As for whether or not to watch it type, you do watch when you are typing, so if I’m going to go back and correct as I go, then I’ll have to look. The downside is that until it adapts to me and becomes more accurate, I’d have to get used to the mental pause of seeing a word typed wrong by “something” else, which may or may not be the same mental load as knowing when I’ve typed a word wrong. What I mean by that is I can take a page of text and look at it and not look at what I’m typing and pretty accurately know when I’ve typed a word wrong, and then back up and correct it, almost without having to look. So if a person is dictating and watching, and making sure that they are adding in punctuation, does it slow them down to see errors made that their typing fingers didn’t make? I don’t know yet. Then there is the issue of correcting. I don’t know if it’s easier to just sit there and dictate and correct later or correct as I go. If I were filling in forms, I suppose it would be easier as to correct right then. But I write a lot, and when I do I edit one or more times before I am done. Perhaps for documents, it might be easier to try my best at punctuation – certainly paragraphs and sentences, but leave other things like hyphens, commas, and bold face type to a second pass. Just for Grins Just for grins, here is the unedited version of the first paragraph that I dictated. This was before I got clued into the idea that I needed to give it punctuation commands. I went back while editing and added some text and split it into two paragraphs. Also, I didn’t edit or correct the above text using Dragon. I ran out of time, but will blog later about my experiences using it some time after I’ve had a chance to play with it some more, learn the commands, and after it has adapted more to me, but so far so good. “What better way to start a blog about using speech recognition with Dragon NaturallySpeaking been to blog about how easy it was to install or not easy to install as the case may be. I loaded Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 Professional Edition today and it took about 20 minutes to install with a few minutes to stop and close the files that needed access by programs such as Word or my e-mails. What I didn't count on was the fact that when I got the package I didn't install it right away and so immediately I had to install service pack one which took about 20 minutes of time. I think it all took about 45 minutes to install everything with a few photog bits of stars but training on the other hand was a breeze.”

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Some days ago, we had our special-edition jam session

on the business advantages of personalization.

Michael Codini talked about how to:

·         Delight callers with personalization

·         Determine if your applications are meeting caller needs

·         Learn from customer behavior

·         Adapt applications on-the-fly based on customer preferences, …

·         Deliver targeted offers

·         Leverage investments in business intelligence

You can find the pdf version of this presentation on the VoiceObjects Developer Portal.

Do you know about our monthly jam sessions? Upcoming topics are available on our developer portal, too.

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